


Come Sail Away

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester Bears the Mark of Cain, M/M, Psychological Horror, epistolary in a sense, first person POV, really goddamn weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:25:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5644066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You and I, we’ve stood at so many breakwaters, waited for so many blackouts. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Dean. And then like a 12-year-old with a Choose Your Adventure book picking her way to one of the many endings and flipping back in dissatisfaction, we were re-written.</i>
</p><p>The Mark is gone, but the world is dying an entropic death. Dean writes a memoir.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Sail Away

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is written in conversational form- as though Dean is addressing Sam directly. It was also written last May, before Season 11 aired, and I'm surprised, reading it now, how thematically it is not so different from having the Darkness unleashed :D

_Question:_ If A starts walking away from B one day as fast as possible— all variables of distance maximization applicable— and B followed, pulled along by gravity and things arguably stronger than that, then compute the time that passes, the distance covered, and the collateral damage that occurs before A and B meet again.

Given predicates and past history, also compute who will walk out of that meeting alive, and why.

*

When I think of you I think of telling you how we always run towards danger thinking this— _this_ conflict is going to change us, change everything we know. We keep slip-sliding towards an event-horizon, past which we think we’ll be changed irrevocably, past where we cease to function, past where we break down with our armor corroded and our skins acid-scarred and our voices locked away in tiny little boxes at the backs of our heads where they’ll never see light again.

You and I, we’ve stood at so many breakwaters, waited for so many blackouts. _Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Dean._ And then like a 12-year-old with a Choose Your Adventure book picking her way to one of the many endings and flipping back in dissatisfaction, we were re-written.

We didn’t change.

We never change.

Do you think this time is unique? I had never stood in a rising lake of blood with joy like a firework inside of me. You have never had to save me from myself, and wonder about losing yourself in the process. There has never been a monster that coiled inside of me, warm weight, growing on the husk of my dreams that are fuelled by bloodlust. I imagine it chewing on dream-fat. I imagine its face smug as a kid’s book illustration of a happy yellow moon. I used to be repelled by the image, but now it’s grown on me: quietly, quietly. A haunting. It’s like something inhabiting a tree, making it a home, breaking it and wearing it down so it has been lived-in. I practice telling you that my monster tastes like sunlight, because is that not strange?

It squeezes my ribcage, squeezes my soul into something small. I’m waiting for it to be as small as a finger before I try to rip it out.

I could give it to you, maybe, huh? Almost all the inventory slots for the items you can hold inside of you are shot to hell and back. _Almost._ There is maybe a single one left, and I think you would lease it to me.

All I would have to do is ask.

                                                                                              *                              

_Conditionals:_

Are either A or B armed? If _yes_ , on a semantic differential scale from _Very Likely_ to _Very Unlikely,_ clarify their propensity for a weapons discharge.

*

In all my dreams, I’m trying to tell you something, and I can’t, so you scream and you scream.

I try to remember when at last I heard you scream, which is not the best way to keep a nightmare at bay. But we advocate mostly stupidity, anyway.

We’d gone armed, prepared, to a place off the map somewhere near Lafayette: there was a simple monster there that we could take down with our eyes closed.

We don’t like the uncanny valley of the humane-looking monster much anymore. It’s always easier to kill that which is alien, that which doesn’t look like us. When its mouths are many and it uses all of them to eat— to swallow a whole family, their fancy pet cockatiel, _and_ half of their IKEA couch— we feel less about feeding it the lethal shotgun meal that’s coming its way than we would if it had had a human face. We feel good again, like heroes, a scrap of the gleam of the family business showing through accrued grime and bloodstain.

We feel simple again.

(And when we ask each other, _hey,_ _remember when we used to hunt wendigos,_ it’s not like we’ve forgotten. You don’t forget what terrorizes you. You don’t forget the hunger in that thing and you don’t forget how fast it moves in the trees and you don’t forget the feel of your brother’s back against yours, sweaty and strong and tense while you wait for it to make the jump on you. But there was a time when we believed something, wasn’t there, still unstained by desperation, when the job was not yet a day-by-day hurtle towards some unnameable, awful ending. We don’t miss the wendigos, do we?

We miss us.)

We didn’t even have a name for the thing. We went anyway: our footsteps on ruins, our guns at the ready—closing in on the thing that crouched in the middle of the living room, the thing grown as big as the ceiling and covered in shell and tentacle. My heart was full of hammers but I smiled when I fired at it, because it existed to be fired at.

We didn’t have to think. It didn’t have a face that made us wonder.

I shot my bullets into the fucker, picking my aim, grim triumph in my veins. Its multiple mouths shot tongues that slithered and stabbed the air, trying to find us, yank us toward its lips. But you and I were well-versed at this dance. It’s all familiar. _Hey, you ugly bastard. Hey, you son of a bitch. Right outta the midnight double feature, aren’t you?_ I loved it, man: the heat in my blood, the rush in my ears, the unceasing pull of the trigger again and again, turning those tongues into mush. Blood-red mush that spattered my skin and didn’t move till I scraped my fingers through it, clawing, disgusted. The monster writhed, wounded for maybe a few seconds before other tongues, other tentacles lashed out, seeking.

(Click and bang—I could do this all day. This was simple, do you see? This was _us._ )

It was screaming, warbling, chirruping—

(—do monsters have language? Maybe it was telling us to _stop_.)

—and its screaming was powerful, a sucking wave, cosmic thing that spliced through our ears. A needle in our brains, long and sharp, the kind you immobilize frogs with. I heard you scream, but you never stopped the rain of bullets from your side. I saw sparks, I saw that it had ripped your shirt, splattered your skin with its blood. I felt wet muscle slither down my neck and grabbed it— sliced it off with the same knife that severed Cain’s arm.

It fell to my feet twitching, and then a wave of something so powerful rose up in me that I nearly crumpled from trying to contain it, Sam.

I was so _alive_.                                             

The Mark didn’t throb its warning: it only lit the fire, and my blood was kindling. I burned, and the fire ate through my eyes and made me see in searing Technicolor, brilliant resolution, every drop of blood and fleck of alien flesh, every stain on the carpet and slice of light on the walls, every place I could slash at and make something bleed.

In that strange broken house with that strange monster that swept thousand tongues across the walls—with the stench of monster blood and the slick of monster guts all around me—I felt _alive._

You called my name. You were firing too, that monster blood streaking your face like neon war-paint. I wanted to hold you down and love you, but at that instant I also wanted to rip out your throat, get your blood on my fingers.

You will never understand.

The slop and the screaming and the sound of shell shattering: you do not know the _power_ of the vicious _now_ , the rush of being _present;_ the moment when impulse is stronger than reason and gravity only means the headlong rush of a blade straight to the heart.

That _unbearable_ lightness that comes with killing.

If it had a color you would call it black, but I would call it something else, a tiny tinted pixel in a pocket of the universe we haven’t seen. It’s not ochre and it’s not ebony; it’s not lemon and it’s not cranberry. It’s something we’ve never seen—a rainbow through a looking glass that peeps into some other world.

You shot again and the monster erupted dead. Around us a rain of goo. I went down too—slip-sliding on that slick floor, my heart in my ears like so many times. I wanted to tell you to _stay where you are_. Stay where you are, Sam. Did you see how I was trying to get away from you? It’s like being trapped on a boat with an animal and nowhere to go except fathoms of salt-water and I didn’t want you to drown.

So.

(— ~~do monsters have language?)~~

Your hand on my shoulder. Hard shake. That was one way, amongst a host of other ways, to make sure someone was still inside their body. You tried other ways. My name from your mouth like benediction. Your fingers on my neck, my shoulders, like burning brands. I could hold them down and make you push harder, get you to reach inside and show you the spill of what I am—what I— _whatever_ I am—and you would see, finally—

It started raining through the broken roof of the house. I looked through the water and saw you in so many more colors than ever before. Your eyes were wide—your hands everywhere. All such frantic motion. You said, _can you see me, can you feel me_. _I’m right here, Dean. I’m right here._

 _Blah, blah, blah,_ I thought, vicious.

I took your hand. My breath stuttered in my throat; sounded less like a breath, more like an animal sound.

Over it was the rain, the patter of it, the taste of it sliding off of you and into me.

Under it the quiet crunch of your fingers breaking.

*

_Given:_

_1)_ _B is greater than or equal to A when it comes to unreliability, and equal to A in terms of predisposition to violence._

_2)_ _An angel, a demon, and a hunter walked into a bar. Only one walked out._

*

This is my dream:

I dream of a long road in the dark, postage-stamp sized splotch of a sun in the distance. In my dream it’s always the same song, played through the car stereo, tinny interference on the passenger side layering the audio with an extra scratch that sounds like a piccolo _._

( _Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, yeah.)_

It’s hot by the side of that road, dusty and windy the way only a desert night can sometimes be, and no light anywhere except for the Impala’s headlights and the red and blue of a Pepsi vending machine in front of a gas-station.

You’ve got color in your cheeks, blood on your knife, and your pulse jumps in your throat— too fast— the thing you killed still bleeding into the pallets behind you. You’re flicking your lighter and dreaming of phantom cigarettes. Your skin is blood and smoke when I kiss you; you squirm away only to whip back twice as fast, your mouth on mine, like something desperate trying to breathe. We are not poetry; when you want, your eyes go dark. When you want, you say, _let me show you_. And: _jack in_. And: _deeper._

I used to skip away from this dream because it turns awful soon, but these days, I stay. I can take awful, so long as you’re in it too. I keep trying to tell you something, something I’ve been trying to say for a very long time. I can’t find the words. Everything hurts so much, and in strobes of light I hear you scream, and the song is loud, louder, louder—and then everything falls away.

And everything’s quiet.

*

Where I am at is a bar that you have never been to. Not _with_ me. It used to be worse, but now it just serves drinks.

I rap my knuckles on the distressed wooden counter, popping peanuts and cheese crackers into my mouth, blinking every time the neon Budweiser sign rotates around to blind me. My mouth tastes of salt. I’m humming the song that goes with the name of the bar, even though the bar isn’t really in New Orleans. It sounds nervous, even to me, a ditty to keep my mind off a guillotine swinging down to meet my neck.

I have to crane my neck to see into the kitchen, where the walls are newly painted red. There’s still one last worker with a bloody face, trying to chop onions into rings. She looks a bit like Jo, if the girl had grown up ‘stead of being meat for the Hellhounds. Same blond hair and hardened look, even as her whole body quivers in a private earthquake. Oil hisses and spits in a steel vat next to her. I hear her sobs. Scraps of what she’s got on the chopping board don’t look much like onions. I won’t lie: all this scares me, man. You think you’ve seen everything there is to be seen, and then some new cluster-fuck hatches so quick you can’t even tell what spawned it.

Broken glass glitters by my fingers, scrunches under my feet, and somewhere inside the bar, the creeping fire is slowly eating the flesh of someone’s inert body.

The reek of charring flesh starts my eyes watering. My lungs strain. I cough. The worker sweeps what’s on the board into the vat, and the stench intensifies. I think of vats of fat and unspooling innards. There’s a comforting familiarity that—

But I didn’t kill anyone here.

I have to remind myself that.

The television above the counter is a static grey, and no one’s changing the channel. Last night on the local news channel, newscaster Robert Ling had shot himself. His brains had hit the camera, which had probably been on automatic, because it kept panning the newsroom with auto-focus picking up fragments of bone and squidgy grey matter.

I know you saw that, because it’s not like you to miss the news if there’s a TV around, Sammy. And I know you stayed here. No one else would sign D. Hasselhoff in the register. (Once I thought of going blind to that, keep walking till I couldn’t, get as far away as I can before, like that horrid old fairy tale about the girl with the red shoes, my feet fall off or something and I’m _forced_ to stop. But it’s all about triage. ~~You always trump everything.)~~

My drink tastes like water. After a while, they all do. And the buzz that you crave is kinda like El Dorado—farther away the further deep you drink yourself under the table. I know you told me it doesn’t help. I know you don’t really believe that, do you?

The rain slings itself against the walls outside, on the windows. It sounds like fingernails scraping. It’s a desperate sound. I see strips of raw night and a neon rainbow outside, tossed about on wet surfaces by a flickering sign. The tacky wash-pails of bougainvillea outside the windows slam against the wood. It sounds like bodies falling.

Everything sounds like something evil, or something helpless. I can’t make up my mind about that one.

I scratch my initials into the counter with the Impala’s keys. It’s a pit-stop on a route map I don’t know who I’m leaving for. Hey, I’m not the one running, and this is the finish line, after all. Phantom pain tingles where the Mark should have been. I fold my hand and unfold it, as if I’m waiting for an unwrapped present to be a surprise again.

The last worker is eyeing the oil vat. She won’t fit in there.

*

_Theorem:_

If you have thought of it but haven’t killed the man yet, it is not actuality but a potentiality.

Even if you picked up the weapon. Even if you picked up the weapon and walked across the room, to where he stood— with the full intention of burying this blade to the hilt in his chest and letting that reservoir of blood in his heart bathe its thick contents all over you— it is still only a potentiality.

There’s a word for all of it, a three-ring circus, a word like the name of mathematically precise, quantum-law-bound monsters.

*

I told you the Book was a bad idea. All of it was a bad idea, man. Magic like that should never have been unleashed, and it’s not like it didn’t come without a warning this time. That Book was like a magic-lamp that came with a clear padlock on it, but you let the genie out, anyway.

I should have said, instead:

_Let’s talk this out. Let’s grab a drink and look up the best beaches around, and makes sure there’s enough whatever to fuel your nerdery while I babe-watch. You don’t have to lock me up anywhere, because we’ll find a way, and if we don’t, we’ll still find a way. ‘Cause that’s what we do._

Because if you don’t get to cop out of life, I don’t get to cop out either. And I should have said, _I’m sorry, Sam,_ in some way that mattered. And I look at where the Mark used to be and I think, we should have let shit go, so we could have climbed past all that and figured out how to talk to each other. Retrospect is a bitch, huh?

The best conversations I have with you are all inside of my head. Add this to them:

 ~~(~~ The list of things we never said to each other ~~: _do you miss the road, do you miss the sky as our roof, do you miss the silence that lasted across miles without being uncomfortable? Do you think four walls was enough to keep us apart, let the doubts creep in?_~~

_~~Do you know when I have nightmares? Do you wish I know when you have them?~~ _

_~~I love you. I miss you. Where did you go?)~~ _

*

_Hypothesis:_

If one were to _free_ that potentiality, it would become unbound to one thing, and go out into the world, where it would wreak havoc and cause untold misery, as all curses do.

If one were _not_ to free that potentiality, it would stay bounded, until it reaches a threshold, at which point it will go out into the world, where it would wreak havoc and cause untold misery, as all curses do.

*

I once told your voicemail about this bar—I said: _man, I wish you could see this. There’s an aquarium on the first floor the size of a whole freaking room, and it’s got all these fish I don’t know the names of. Maybe you’d know their names. I can see crabs though, and loads of those funny looking things they call sea cucumbers, which, god knows_ why _they’re called that, they’d put me off cucumbers forever. And when they feed ‘em through a hole at the top, it’s a little underwater mutiny. All those tiny mouths. I feel sorry for that fish._

(I think I was drunk then, and you were gone. Not college; it was not that long ago. Maybe one of the times you called my bullshit and walked out. Maybe Hell. I wonder where those messages go. If you listen to them sometimes and _know_ why—and then I fear—if you—)

The aquarium is still there. I see you through the greenish water, your face cut by swaying kelp blades and shafts of buzzing aquarium lights. You wear clothes that aren’t yours: a tie-dye T-shirt, strange jeans. Your fingers are fat and sausage-like in layers of gauze. They will not heal right.

Everything smells—tastes—like burning. My skin, my mouth.

Everything is burning somewhere that is not here.

 _Entelechy_ —

“—is not the name of a monster,” you say. _Dean,_ you say. _Dean, oh god, do you still—?_ _Did it—?_ “Did it work?”

I show you my hand.

Your grin is sharp as a shark, and just as wide.

Entelechy is not a monster.

It’s a thing.

Once long ago, someone talked to me about thermodynamics. Some surprise in the packaging of a shady bar pick-up: I remember her hips, and the sharp curve of her back. Tall, rawboned girl; beach-blond hair and roughened palms. Her multiple braids that smacked my face when she came, whispered ‘ _ow’_ and her high-pitched giggle. And something, blah blah, isolated system, entropy—stuff she was reading to pass an exam, to get out, escape.

_You know, the world can end that way. Entropic death. End of order, disintegration, thermodynamic chaos. It’s a concept._

Speaking from experience, man, I’d say concepts are as goddamn likely to come true as anything.

Your room opens out into a balcony that sags from the weight of a badly calculated beam; all the more reason for it to look as if it’s leaping off the pockmarked walls of this motel and stopped to think half a jump into the sea. It’s the windward side, which means that the mornings smell like ash and the evenings like salt, and everywhere in between is just a constant flux of wind-blown debris. I couldn’t stand there without my eyes tearing up and my lungs screaming. Some of it gets caught in the grills: plastic, and torn balloons, and scraps of what looks like a bird’s nest. Sometimes, a whole lot of sand gets picked up off the beach and deposited here.

(If I close my eyes just a little, just enough to keep the line at the horizon where the sand meets the sea in my field of vision, then there’s just enough sand to hold between my toes, and pretend.)

*

I have that dream again. The same song, the same nameless stop on a highway, the same want in your eyes before everything goes wrong.

I’m still trying to find the words.

You’re still screaming.

*

After a few weeks, I stop triangulating this mess. I mean, I could sit and I could read the shitty _Quantitative Techniques_ book that some well-meaning MBA grad left down in the bar (all the right ways to hypothesize, all the right tables to calculate how fast something could head into the kingdom of Fuck Up, all the equations to figure out where your angel could be and come up trounced), and I could mope and peep over your shoulder, and I could look at the way people are disappearing or killing themselves or—whatever it is that people do now.

 _Or_ I could take a walk, breathing mist and rain into my lungs, the wind brisk with salt and the sky afire with stars, watching the sea crash into the rocks. There’s not much to do here. You’re still working feverishly on that Book, same as always, same as I expected you to, because you seem to think that fixing A with B— and then fixing B with C, and so on—is still a workable option. But then, I think that too. It’s the only thing that has ever gotten us anywhere: that there’s always a way forward, out of anything.

(But always _into_ something else. And you tell me, we’ll burn the bridge with _something else_ on it when it comes to that. _Like we do, Dean._ Like always.)

The last of the lights on the coastline winks out today. I watch ruin settle there: sky gone dark, ashen, beach black and barren. The surf has gone still, receding, the corroding tops of cars on the interstate is visible all the way here. Nothing can be sustained. Sky, earth, concrete, drugs, sex, electricity—even water. It’s over. Out there, the gravel is slag melted into funny, incomprehensible shapes; the trees are naked, coughing streamers of grey with every wind that shakes them. Out here, the sea crashes into the rocks just as any other day, and there’s the steady sound of a generator crackling, overpowered by _The_ _Killers_ on your iPod. You got it back when the first cracks were showing in the world, and it’s been singing since. All our favorite songs—yours _and_ mine—no one in the driver’s seat anymore. It’s kinda like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned, but what else could Nero have done anyway? Pour useless fucking buckets of water at the inferno?

I come barefoot into the kitchen where you’re chopping up onions—just the two of us, now, and the sea—and watch the rhythm of your fingers and the crease between your eyes that speak of concentration as you turn a page of _American Gods_. I creep, trailing sand, to where a cup of coffee sits on the counter, gone cold. I’m thinking of cleaning the guns, but I don’t know what—or who—I’m doing it for. I pick up the cup, and then I hover. I watch the drops of water trapped at the tips of your hair, glinting in the light sluicing through the blinds. I watch the flesh of your palm, blue with ink from the endless scribbling you do, trying to figure out the Book. Your fingers didn’t heal right, and your handwriting is different now. It’s harder to read. I haven’t tried, though; haven’t looked at the Book. You think I’m angry at you for that, but I never was. I never could be.

You catch me watching. Your eyes are bright, stark against the deep pools of shadows beneath them. “It’s strange now, this book,” you say. “Remember when we got trapped in a motel with all those crazy Gods? They didn’t give a shit about the world…”

I feel loose from my walk, liquid-limbed, hard to keep my shape. I slump over you, and you grunt, but you can take the weight. I say, “Hard to blame them.”

“Huh?”

I make my shoulders shrug a little. “World’s always trying to kill itself, ain’t it? Maybe we’ll just let it, this time. Honor the DNR.”

You look at the Book, sitting above the humming refrigerator. Your voice rumbles through me when you speak. “No, Dean. This is on me.”

“You didn’t know any of this was going to happen.”

You snort. “We never seem to, do we.”

I hover between resorting to catatonia and saying something, and then I think, _fuck it._ Profoundly, again, feel the depth of meaning: _fuck it._ I lean to whisper, “Maybe you don’t care, anymore.”

“I don’t?” The song changes. A whisper of silence, for a second, and then _Come Sail Away._ Your eyes flick to the dock. I ache, intoxicated by the calm, the ruin, the scent of rough yellow soap on your skin. I kiss you, and feel something bright grow in my chest—white, cool longing. Salt, smoke, everything falling away into your mouth. We come apart gasping like those poor starving fishes, depraved of air, breathing fast in that room full of slanted sunlight and dust motes like missiles.

“You’re the reckless one, Sammy, everyone always knew that.”

You look away, turn another page. Shadow’s talking to his dead wife in there. Bits of her are rotting off. I recognize the character because you told me this story before, long before, when Dad was still alive and we weren’t fucked up enough to start fucking around. I feel you breathe beneath me, slow and steady. Your hand is trembling, just a little, knife skittering over the onions. There are tears in both our eyes from the sting.

“What are you saying?” you ask.

My own breath rattles in my chest like coins. I’m trying to tell you how tired I am. How tired we are. How worn, how rattled, how decayed. I think I have been, all along, stumbling to find the words. For years—forever—trying to find the words that will stop the screaming to come. And now I tell them to you.

“I’m saying it’s okay. _We’re_ okay. We can stop.”

You watch me for a long time. And then you say, “Let’s swim.”

Outside, the sea’s gone wilder. The water’s cold, but it still moves, which is better than the still tide in other places where the fishes molder. I watch the flex of your back as you run to the water, shout out the mandatory _dude, it’s freezing in there,_ but I follow you anyway. I only stand at the breakers. You swim far too close to the decay, and I call out several times—afraid now, afraid now—but you flip back around, long-limbed, foam pulling you under and letting you back up again, and the sun is white and cold and leave the back of my eyelids crimson and green when I close them.

When you come back out, it’s dark and the water’s moon-washed. “I’m so cold,” you say. Drops of water roll down your cheek. You sit down on the sand and turn your face to me and I kiss you again, for a long time. Your fingers scribble something on the sand, hard words now, hard even for me. I take your hand and then I hold it to the sky, and watch the moon come in through crooked fingers. The sea has washed the ink away. You mumble something, and then something else, and I figure out that they are names: names of everyone who wouldn’t care if you just _stopped_. It’s a good list. A strong list. You could be convinced with that list, if you weren’t doing the convincing yourself.

“A woman in a field,” you say. “Something grabbed her.”

“What?”

“That’s from _The Book of the Damned,_ by Charles Fort. Something grabbed her. The woman in the field. It could be this, it could be what’s nabbing everyone now, this ruin—,” you roll onto your stomach, turn your head slightly to watch where the sky’s ink-black and the tide is still. The decay. It is close enough that I can see a tiny speck rapidly erasing itself: an ice-cream stall. I’d passed it on my way here.

You hold yourself very still. Your eyes are fever-bright, as always these days. “It won’t be long now.”

“Long enough,” I say. I push you to roll you back over.

“We’re okay,” you repeat, like in a dream. There’s a little sand stuck to your cheek. “We’re both okay. And we can stop now. We can _stop._ ”

“That’s right,” I say, climbing over you. I’m still playing that song in my head. And your nails rake the skin on my back and you gasp, and you get the same dark look in your eyes when you lead me, show me what you want, _tell_ me, with your mouth and the staccato of your hips and the half-foreign language of your wandering fingers—but you don’t scream. I think, if you scream, the fucking spell will break and I will be back in the dream. We will be back in the same going-nowhere cycle, at the same nameless way-station, speeding towards the same monster called _rinse-repeat_.

You don’t scream. Instead, you bring me off with strong, steady fingers, suck my own scream out of my chest to leave me wrecked, soaked and sand-bruised. “We can stop,” you say into my mouth. And then you kiss me sweet like you’re seventeen and not thirty-two, innocent and not gun-savvy, and when you stand up the sand from your skin falls like rain all around me.

You’ve always been the Man of Letters, brother, but this is strange weather. I watch you throw together a pile of driftwood and the Book of the Damned, other pieces of paper, old parchments and thick sheets of vellum covered with writing. You flick a lighter and let it all burn. _American Gods_ stays. The thing you call your diary goes, but Dad’s journal stays. I pick it up and pieces of it come out: the vampire, the difference between one and a _dhampir,_ Dad’s squiggly script about werewolves and your blocky additions. I flip through the monsters that were only his and the monsters that were only ours, even an occasional monster that was only ever Bobby’s. There’s still a quarter of the book unwritten, and when I look at the back cover, there’s even Henry’s spidery contribution: _words transcend time_.

And I think of how we don’t have any words that should transcend time—no ultimate epiphany here being an asshole and showing up at the end of all things—but maybe the small truths matter: this beach, and the dream, and the thing about the wendigos, and the house in Lafayette. Broken fingers, and _Quantitative Techniques,_ and the dead girl who looked a bit like another dead girl, and thermodynamics. The decay, and sea cucumbers, and the sand between my toes.

( _The sand between my toes, Sammy.)_

And even if this will fall to ruin: Sam, and Dean, and all that—you know.

And so there is a bonfire, and you, and a Kansas song on the iPod. I hold my hands to the flames till they glow. And then I pick up a pen, click the top, and begin.


End file.
